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With Skulls and Bones, Signs That Say ‘Speed Kills’

New York City, it turns out, has a speed limit: 30 miles per hour. The Transportation Department is hoping a pixelated image of a skeleton will make you remember.

Newly designed speed boards — those radar-equipped digital signs that warn drivers how fast they are moving — will be unveiled this summer to send a spooky message to lead-footed New Yorkers. Whenever the signs detect a car exceeding the 30-m.p.h. limit on city streets, an LED skeleton will appear, underscoring the potentially deadly consequences of speeding.

The skeleton is a bony version of the familiar pedestrian stick figure used on crosswalk lights. A message, rendered entirely in capital letters, will say, simply, “Slow Down.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg compared the graphic imagery to the skull-and-crossbones labels printed on cigarette packs in other countries to warn smokers about lung cancer.

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To promote pedestrian safety, the city plans to introduce LED warning signs that feature a skeletal figure and warn drivers of the speed limit and how fast they are going.Credit
New York City Department of Transportation

“The idea is to get people to realize that what they’re doing can kill them or kill somebody else,” the mayor said at a news conference on Thursday. “Unless you make it graphic, people don’t get the message.”

Skeletons are already a trope of the Transportation Department’s “That’s Why It’s 30” publicity campaign, which reminds drivers through bus shelter posters and television announcements that cars traveling at 40 m.p.h. are far more dangerous to pedestrians than vehicles that follow the speed limit.

Four of the LED boards, which can detect vehicle speeds from up to half a mile away, will be placed around the city, although the Transportation Department has not yet determined the locations.

To complement its anti-speeding campaign, the city is also planning to reduce the speed limit to 20 m.p.h. in a specific section of the Claremont neighborhood in the Bronx.

The experiment will test whether the city can successfully reduce traffic speeds by concentrating on a broad part of a borough, rather than taking its usual piecemeal approach along specific streets.

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Credit
New York City Department of Transportation

Claremont was chosen as a pilot neighborhood for its historically high volume of traffic accidents compared with the rest of the city. The quarter-square-mile stretch where the speed limit will be reduced runs parallel to the Sheridan Expressway and has a number of schools, subway stops, senior centers and residential streets, which officials said made it a prime candidate for a program intended to increase pedestrian safety.

Of course, in the most congested parts of Manhattan, below Central Park, automobiles rarely reach anywhere near the speed limit. On an average weekday, cars crawl along at 9.3 miles per hour.

But the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, during whose tenure traffic deaths have dropped to their lowest point in a century, said the city still needed a way to grab drivers’ attention.

“Crashes involving speeding are twice as deadly for pedestrians, so our anti-speeding efforts need to be just as aggressive,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Mr. Bloomberg concurred.

“If you save one life, it’s one of the more brilliant ideas I’ve ever heard,” he said of the signs. “Who knows whether it’s going to save a life? But at least we’re trying to save lives rather than just sitting around and complaining and saying people should.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2011, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: With Skulls And Bones, Signs That Say ‘Speed Kills’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe